Who’s funding the ‘Freedom convoy’? What leaked data suggests about GiveSendGo donors

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2022 (1047 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nearly 41 per cent of the more than $10.7 million donated to the “Freedom convoy” through an online fundraising site has come from the United States, leaked data suggests.

The newly emerged information paints a picture of the fundraising that has become an international show of support and a financial life-line for the protest in the nation’s capital against COVID-19 health restrictions and vaccine mandates — a demonstration-turned occupation that has inspired border blockades and other actions across the country.

The data surfaced online Sunday night after hackers breached GiveSendGo security and took over the website. The Christian crowdfunding site has not confirmed that the information as authentic.

What is there shows a list of donations starting Feb 2., 2022 — the day the GiveSendGo fundraiser became active — with unique email addresses and postal or zip codes for each entry.

The data suggests there have been more than 92,400 donations to the “Freedom Convoy 2022” campaign, which was started by protest leader Tamara Lich.

The Star obtained a copy of the data from the whistleblower collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOS), which stressed it had not carried out the hack. The data is consistent with information about the Freedom Convoy 2022 top donors that is published publicly on the GiveSendGo website. The Star further reached out to 20 donors listed in the dataset. Four responded and confirmed that the information pertaining to them was accurate. Officials from GiveSendGo did not respond to an interview request, and have not publicly commented about the hacker attack.

A majority of money donated — about 52 per cent, or $5.4 million — appears to have come from Canadian sources. Meanwhile, more individual Americans appear to have donated to the campaign than Canadians. The data shows 51,666 American donations, compared to the 36,202 from Canada.

The fundraising snapshot comes as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Measures Act on Monday to put an end to the protest in Ottawa as well as related blockades. At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the federal government was enacting new rules to govern crowdfunding to ensure such efforts are not used for illegal activities. As of Monday, all crowdfunding platforms must register with federal regulators and have to report large and suspicious transactions. They also have to provide more information to law enforcement investigating funding to the Ottawa protest.

The Star was able to identify the provincial origin of 36,138 Canadian donations to the GiveSendGo campaign, according to postal code data revealed in the breach.

The most donations per capita came from Western Canada, with $2,540,147 being linked to 15,406 donations from postal codes in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Yukon.

In those four jurisdictions, an average of $248 was raised per 1,000 people in the population. That accounts for about 46 per cent of the Canadian funds raised with about 28 per cent of the population.

The largest total donation amount by province came from Ontario, which totalled $2,071,493 in donations. The city of Toronto was a relatively modest donation source for the campaign, with $274,469 raised through 2,068 donations, according to the data.

Protest leaders turned to GiveSendGo as a fundraising vehicle after their original GoFundMe campaign, which raised more than $10 million, was shuttered once police told the platform the money was being used for unlawful activities.

Regina Bateson, an assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, said that Americans funding the Ottawa protest is “really a Pandora’s box that sets a dangerous precedent,” because it opens the door to significant foreign influence over Canadian politics.

“We don’t even have a term for what has happened here. Is it crowdfunding as a kind of proxy warfare? Is it funding as an intervention?” said Bateson, who is an American citizen.

“It is clear current laws and regulations had not even contemplated that thousands of people in another country would donate millions of dollars to any kind of social movement, let alone an illegal occupation.”

Comments accompanying the donations on the fundraiser page suggest the donations come from individuals who believe in the convoy’s message of “freedom” from vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions. Messages like “God bless the truckers,” and “Thank you for fighting for freedom” appear thousands of times.

One of the top American donors on the campaign agreed to an interview with the Star.

Ben Lynch, a naturopathic doctor from Seattle, Wash., donated $5,000 to the campaign. He says that came after he tried to donate $2,500 to the GoFundMe campaign, and was refunded.

Lynch said U.S. donations to the cause shouldn’t be seen as unusual or suspicious, and that the “Freedom convoy” may have started in Canada but that it is having ripple effects all over the world. The protest has inspired protests in other countries, including a scheduled convoy to Washington, D.C., later this month.

“I look at the Freedom convoy as a symbol of igniting the entire world toward saying: ‘We’re done,’” he said. “We need to, as democratic countries, rise up band together and tell our governments peacefully that this is over, and stop doing this. And only if there’s high enough numbers will we influence the governments.”

The first person to donate to the GiveSendGo campaign was American Jeff Brain who founded the social media platform Clouthub and promotes the protest on his website.

“I did contribute $100 to the trucker campaign because I believe in freedom. It is wrong to label it an insurrection but that seems to be the go to narrative by the opposition to dismiss even someone’s best intentions to protest peacefully for their rights,” Brain said in an email.

GiveSendGo has suffered a series of recent data breaches.

Last week, a breach in the website’s security allowed hackers to access thousands of images of personal data, including drivers’ licences, passports and credit-card information.

The hack that led to the data for the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign being leaked became widely known Sunday evening after DailyDot reporter Mikael Thalen posted about it around 10 p.m. Within the hour, the news and the files had spread rapidly.

The unidentified hackers also took over GiveSendGo website, redirecting visitors to another website that featured an anti-protest manifesto scrolling over a scene from Disney’s “Frozen.”

“You are committed to funding anything that keeps the raging fire of misinformation going until that it burns the world’s collective democracies down,” reads the message. “On behalf of sane people worldwide who wish to continue living in a democracy, I am telling you now that GiveSendGo is frozen.”

That website was briefly restored Sunday night, but was quickly hacked again. This time visitors were redirected to an explicit pornographic image.

GiveSendGo was briefly up again late Sunday night, but was offline again Monday for “maintenance and server upgrades.”

Bateson said there had been indications of extensive American support for the campaign before the hack, with donors indicating where they were from in the comment section of the website. The leaked data contains thousand of comments from donors who call the Ottawa protest a fight for freedom.

As someone who lived through the 2016 American election and watched the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection from afar, Bateson urged a degree of caution.

She said a social media war about the protest is being waged by both sides of the political divide and that it includes incendiary posts and fake Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Other fundraisers unrelated to GiveSendGo are ongoing, including a bitcoin fundraiser by five men that includes one of the “Freedom Convoy’s” original organizers that has raised around $1.19 million for the protesters.

Last week, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted a request from the provincial government to freeze funds donated to GiveSendGo for the protesters. A message on the GiveSendGo Twitter page has pushed back against the order, saying the government has no right to freeze the money.

Grant LaFleche is a St. Catharines-based investigative reporter with the Standard. Reach him via email: grant.lafleche@niagaradailies.com

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen